Existing Member

More than just MIGRATION

Smaller businesses often
have negative experiences
with traditional IT systems
due to cost and skill restrictions.
But a Bunch of Cowboys and
a cloud computing approach
can help out immensely, as
one physical storage company
recently found out.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH

For 25-seat storage specialist,
Spare Room, self storage,
traditional Web-based email
and two previous email servers
provided less than optimal
functionality and pricing. That’s
when the company called in
systems integrator, Bunch of
Cowboys IT, to work out a better solution.

“Initially, they started out with standard POP3
or IMAP email,” Bunch of Cowboys IT director,
Dale Harper, explained. “But that quickly becomes
untenable for a business environment.

“They understood very clearly the advantages
of a business email and collaboration system
like Exchange. It’s a ubiquitous, sophisticated
and very good email system which had been
great for them. But they eventually baulked
at that and asked, ‘how can we do this more
cheaply? Let’s go open source’. Interestingly, they
tried Zimbra.”

Zimbra, which was owned by Yahoo but is now
the subject of an acquisition by VMware, was and
is an advanced piece of open source software.
Initially, the email and collaboration solution
seemed suitable, offering advanced features for
an attractive upfront cost.

“But it was still expensive because of the need
to host your own Exchange infrastructure, the cost
of hardware and off-site backups,” Harper said.
“Having to worry about that administratively and
cost-wise for a company like Spare Room didn’t
make sense.”

SELLING MIGRATION

Eventually, Bunch of Cowboys IT had the
opportunity to outline the benefits of moving to
Google Apps Premier Edition about 18 months
ago. But despite the uncomfortable costs and
complex IT work required with the solutions Spare
Room experienced, Harper still found the sell to
be the most challenging part of the migration
process. He highlighted staff and the owner
struggled to grasp the concept of cloud.

Being an SMB and thinking of IT as a means to
an end, his client was not looking to be an email
system pioneer, Harper said.

“This is not a business looking to lead the way
for the sake of it. They just really want business
benefits and a return on investment,” he said.
“In this particular instance, it was all about saying
‘what will take the least amount of effort, what’s
the most robust and secure platform and where is
the IT momentum, what is everyone else doing’?

“They didn’t care about the technical details,
all they wanted to hear was that Google has
three copies of their emails floating out on their
cloud infrastructure at any one time and that
feature for feature, Google Apps Premier Edition
is compellingly and clearly competitive compared
to established vendors.”

Community Comments

iAsset is a channel management ecosystem that automates all major aspects of the entire sales,marketing and service process, including data tracking, integrated learning, knowledge management and product lifecycle management.

Copyright 2015 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.